I could not stand it, and I got up to go away, feeling extremely
_particeps criminis_. Mrs. Makely seemed to have a conscience as light as
air.
"If Reuben Camp or the head-waiter don't bring back some of those tickets,
I don't know what I shall do. I shall have to put chairs into the aisles
and charge five dollars apiece for as many people as I can crowd in there.
I never knew anything so perfectly providential."
"I envy you the ability to see it in that light, Mrs. Makely," I said,
faint at heart. "Suppose Camp crowds the place full of his trainmen, how
will the ladies that you've sold tickets to at five dollars apiece like
it?"
"Pooh! What do I care how they like it! Horrid things! And for repairs on
the house of Gawd, it's the same as being in church, where everybody is
equal."
The time passed. Mrs. Makely sold chances to all the ladies in the house;
on Friday night Reuben Camp brought her a hundred dollars; the head-waiter
had already paid in twenty-five. "I didn't dare to ask them if they
speculated on them," she confided to me. "Do you suppose they would have
the conscience?"
They had secured the large parlor of the hotel, where the young people
danced in the evening, and where entertainments were held, of the sort
usually given in summer hotels; we had already had a dramatic reading, a
time with the phonograph, an exhibition of necromancy, a concert by a
college glee club, and I do not know what else.
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